What is marketing?

Philip Kotler, one of the leading marketing academics describes it as ‘a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and managing customer’s relationships in ways that benefit the organisation.’ It includes market research, product development, distribution, pricing, advertisement, personal selling and online-social interaction just to name a few elements. It should be the central core of your business and shape the way you service and communicate to your clients.

How does marketing help us?

As discussed in the following video, Barrack Obama conducted a very successful marketing campaign that ultimately won him the presidency.

If Barrack can become president through effective marketing, imagine the results we could affect locally.

Where to from here?

Over the coming months, I invite you to reinvent your personal marketing with me, to complement your businesses infra structure. Having just completed a course at university I am pretty excited to explore the possibilities available. I will be starting at the base, researching what my marketplace wants (through door-knocking etc a prospecting method in its self), to creating a new ‘product’ based on consumers demands and finishing with pricing, promotion & customer retention.

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I was really impressed by the calibre & determination that these young agents displayed & feel now that it’s more important than ever that real estate principals start embracing the young guns of real estate.

One thing I noticed was their genuine concern for getting rid of the cowboys out of our industry & their absolute passion for real estate & their customers.

After discussing the different ways that these agents can leverage the internet to network & market property, I encourage both potential customers & employers to investigate some of the concepts & tools that these young agents have at their disposal, sooner rather than later.

As I wrote in a previous post, Gen Y agents are the future of our industry & from what I could see our industry is in some very good hands.

For instance, here’s a couple of video interviews done by SoldTV that feature 3 Young Guns of our industry, Andrew Lutze, Christie Smith & Lachlan Bate.

Real Estate Training… Young Guns Part 1

Real Estate Training… Young Guns Part 2

Whilst the young agents I met all said that they have a huge respect for the older generation of our industry, some did admit that they find it frustrating how slow the older generation were to adapt to technology & often end up having to deal with lots of the basic technical issues within the office.

Even though most young agents said that they were happy to help out, they also don’t want to be seen as the office geek. They’d much prefer to be engaged in networking with customers, refining their skills & being more dollar productive with their time.

I see that a fast paced, dynamic Gen Y real estate agent being held back by a slow to adapt Gen X or Baby Boomer boss is a recipe for disaster & is a major blockage that is currently happening throughout most of our industry.

It’s something that the Gen X & Baby Boomer business owners will need to adapt to very quickly if they want to retain young, dynamic & effective Gen Y agents.

What do you think? Do you see this as an issue or not? Are you forced to do things the old school way, when you know that you could do things a lot faster & easier? Or are you an older agent & you’re not sure how much freedom & responsibility you should give your younger agents?

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Twitter is one of the fastest growing phenomena on the internet & it’s not just for the celebrities & politicians.

Lots of companies are now achieving great results by incorporating Twitter into both their marketing & their day-to-day online communications.

With people now spending more & more of their time on Social Media, it’s important that real estate agents & property managers start to become part of the online conversation.

What is Twitter & Why Is It So Good For Real Estate Agents?

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that allows messages (tweets) of 140 characters or less to be posted up onto the web in real time.

It provides the convenience of text messaging but with the additional advantage that the messages are posted up onto the web for others to see, plus it’s without the costs involved with SMS, because Twitter is free to use.

How Can Agents Leverage Their Marketing By Using Twitter?

Did you know that one single message posted onto Twitter can also be automatically sent out across to numerous other Social Media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendfeed, Plaxo, MySpace, Blogger, WordPress, etc… all from just one single tweet.

Also, if other people on Twitter like your message then they will often share your tweet with their followers as well, and your friends on Facebook could share the message with their friends on Facebook too, etc, etc.

Which means that one tweet can not only be leveraged out across a number of your own Social Media accounts but they can also end up being shared amongst the Social Networks of your friends & followers to help you get your message out across the web.

For instance, there have been lots of times where I’ve posted a message onto Twitter which other people on Twitter have found interesting & subsequently they’ve shared the message with their followers by Retweeting my message.

And likewise there’s  lots of times where I Retweet other people’s messages that I think my followers may be interested in.

Here’s an example of how a retweeted message looks.

RT @GregVincent: Suncorp says Thank You Mr Hooker as they sell LJ Hooker to LJ Hooker ~ http://ow.ly/qQ6d

Sometimes, the people who retweet your message have only a handful of followers & others have thousands of followers who can potentially see your message.

And, this is only a small part of how Twitter can spread your message.

Here’s a snapshot of how Twitter works for me & how it could work for you.

As well as writing articles & posting them onto sites like GenYre = energy, each week I write the Real Estate Agent Newsletter for the Real Estate Agent Success Club & send it out to agents via email.

Prior to using Social Media, email was the only way that I could share my newsletters out across the web.

But now I can also share each of the Real Estate Agent Newsletters with my followers & friends across all of my Social Networks via a single tweet.

For example, here’s what I do each week.

Once I’ve completed my newsletter I email it out to my database. Then I simply post a tweet with a link to the Real Estate Agent Newsletter up onto Twitter for my Twitter followers to read. And then within seconds, that same tweet automatically appears as an update on my Facebook profile, Facebook Fan Pages, plus it also appears on my other profiles like LinkedIn, Friendfeed, Plaxo, etc.

On top of that, I also have a Twitter feed appearing on my websites which means that if someone is visiting my site then they can also read my tweets & potentially read the newsletter too.

Should Agents Have More Than One Twitter Account?

You may have noticed that the Twitter feed for this site appears on the right hand side about half way down the site & features updates from Twitter.com/GenYRealEstate & not my personal Twitter account.

Twitter also allows you to have multiple accounts & I’ve created a separate Twitter account specifically for this site.

The reason I’ve done this is because the GenYre site has been set up for multiple contributors & the contributors will also have access to update the GenYRealEstate Twitter account which enables them to share tweets that they feel may be helpful to the Genyre = energy readers & followers.

(Real Estate Agents could easily do a similar thing by having a personal twitter account for each staff member  & a company twitter account that each of their staff could tweet interesting real estate related content to.)

Since the Real Estate Agent Newsletter provides helpful tips for real estate agents which is good information for GenYre = energy readers & followers, I also send out a Tweet linked to each week’s newsletter via the Twitter.com/GenYRealEstate account simultaneously.

If you think this sounds a bit hard to do or really time consuming, check this out…

Now that I have this set up, all I have to do is write an article, email it to my database & tweet a link to the newsletter and within seconds I have shared my newsletter out to thousands & thousands of people amongst lots of different networks over the internet.

When I think back to what I had to do years ago to get thousands of people to read one of my articles & the expense involved, I have to say that spreading a message doesn’t get much easier or any cheaper than this.

Plus, there’s also an extra added bonus.

Because my articles now sit up on the web forever, people also come across them via Google, Bing, Yahoo and other Social Bookmarking sites like Digg, Stumbleupon & Delicious, etc.  People will often quote from my articles & link across to them from their own articles too.

If you’d like to find out more about how you can create a similar marketing strategy within your agency and how it all works, you may want to come along and catch up at one of the Social Media for Real Estate Seminars.

Here’s something else that works really well…

Before I go, there’s one more thing that I do with Twitter that I’ve found works really well & could work well for real estate agents too.

In a previous post I shared a YouTube video I did about The Password To Help You Achieve Your Goals & whilst it’s really easy to create & upload a video onto YouTube, the hardest part is getting a large number of people to watch it.

So, what I do is, anytime someone follows me on Twitter they automatically receive an email from me saying,

” Thanks for following me. Here’s a quick video tip I made that may help you to achieve your goals http://tr.im/lQg1 “

I set this automated email response up from my Twitter account about 4 – 5 months ago & before doing this I’d only had about 20 people who’d watched the video in the previous 2 months. Now the videos had over 650 views & I haven’t touched it since setting this automated response up.

So much of my marketing happens automatically for me now.

Note:  http://Tr.im is a URL shortening service that makes it easier to link to a website within the 140 characters available on Twitter & the links are trackable.

As of today I’ve had 339 people click open the link directly from the automated emails sent to my new followers. I don’t know where the rest of the other 300 views have come from. They could be from the previous blog post or from people simply watching videos directly on YouTube.  I’ve done the video once & the rest just happens.

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And in Nielsen’s March 2009 report on Social Networking’s New Global Footprint, their research showed that “time spent on social network and blogging sites is growing at over 3x the rate of overall Internet growth & the total amount of time spent on Facebook increased by 566%.”

Yet with such overwhelming statistics, it’s surprising to see that there are still a lot of real estate companies that don’t appear to be embracing Social Media at all.

If you’re not currently part of the conversation on Social Media you may think that ignorance is bliss, but it’s not.

With over ¼ of the US & Australian population now using Facebook, then I’m sorry to say that by ignoring it, agents are missing out on an opportunity to engage personally with an enormous part of their market.

For example, I recently did an internet marketing campaign that was sent out exclusively via both email & Social Media and the results were quite staggering.

43.4% of the traffic came from Social Media sites like Twitter & Facebook and the remaining 56.6% came via email.

Whilst email is probably the only thing that hasn’t changed very much over the past 10 years, there are now much better ways that you can re-purpose the same email marketing message & leverage it out to a much larger audience.

And in a recent experiment conducted by Nielsen, “it actually appears that Social Media use makes people consume email more, not less.”

If you’re still not convinced about embracing Social Media, then check out this incredible insight from Socialnomics.

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